The invention relates to a system and an interactive method for responding to speech based user inputs and queries presented over a distributed network such as the INTERNET or local intranet. This interactive system when implemented over the World-Wide Web services (WWW) of the INTERNET, functions so that a client or user can ask a question in a natural language such as English, French, German, Spanish or Japanese and receive the appropriate answer at his or her computer or accessory also in his or her native natural language. The system has particular applicability to such applications as remote learning, e-commerce, technical e-support services, INTERNET searching, etc.
The INTERNET, and in particular, the World-Wide Web (WWW, is growing in popularity and usage for both commercial and recreational purposes, and this trend is expected to continue. This phenomenon is being driven, in part, by the increasing and widespread use of personal computer systems and the availability of low cost INTERNET access. The emergence of inexpensive INTERNET access devices and high speed access techniques such as ADSL, cable modems, satellite modems, and the like, are expected to further accelerate the mass usage of the WWW.
Accordingly, it is expected that the number of entities offering services, products, etc., over the WWW will increase dramatically over the coming years. Until now, however, the INTERNET xe2x80x9cexperiencexe2x80x9d for users has been limited mostly to non-voice based input/output devices, such as keyboards, intelligent electronic pads, mice, trackballs, printers, monitors, etc. This presents somewhat of a bottleneck for interacting over the WWW for a variety of reasons.
First, there is the issue of familiarity. Many kinds of applications lend themselves much more naturally and fluently to a voice-based environment. For instance, most people shopping for audio recordings are very comfortable with asking a live sales clerk in a record store for information on titles by a particular author, where they can be found in the store, etc. While it is often possible to browse and search on one""s own to locate items of interest, it is usually easier and more efficient to get some form of human assistance first, and, with few exceptions, this request for assistance is presented in the form of a oral query. In addition, many persons cannot or will not, because of physical or psychological barriers, use any of the aforementioned conventional I/O devices. For example, many older persons cannot easily read the text presented on WWW pages, or understand the layout/hierarchy of menus, or manipulate a mouse to make finely coordinated movements to indicate their selections. Many others are intimidated by the look and complexity of computer systems, WWW pages, etc., and therefore do not attempt to use online services for this reason as well.
Thus, applications which can mimic normal human interactions are likely to be preferred by potential on-line shoppers and persons looking for information over the WWW. It is also expected that the use of voice-based systems will increase the universe of persons willing to engage in e-commerce, e-learning, etc. To date, however, there are very few systems, if any, which permit this type of interaction, and, if they do, it is very limited. For example, various commercial programs sold by IBM (VIAVOICE(trademark)) and Kurzweil (DRAGON(trademark)) permit some user control of the interface (opening, closing files) and searching (by using previously trained URLs) but they do not present a flexible solution that can be used by a number of users across multiple cultures and without time consuming voice training. Typical prior efforts to implement voice based functionality in an INTERNET context can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,220 incorporated by reference herein.
Another issue presented by the lack of voice-based systems is efficiency. Many companies are now offering technical support over the INTERNET, and some even offer live operator assistance for such queries. While this is very advantageous (for the reasons mentioned above) it is also extremely costly and inefficient, because a real person must be employed to handle such queries. This presents a practical limit that results in long wait times for responses or high labor overheads. An example of this approach can be seen U.S. Pat. No. 5,802,526 also incorporated by reference herein. In general, a service presented over the WWW is far more desirable if it is xe2x80x9cscalable,xe2x80x9d or, in other words, able to handle an increasing amount of user traffic with little if any perceived delay or troubles by a prospective user.
In a similar context, while remote learning has become an increasingly popular option for many students, it is practically impossible for an instructor to be able to field questions from more than one person at a time. Even then, such interaction usually takes place for only a limited period of time because of other instructor time constraints. To date, however, there is no practical way for students to continue a human-like question and answer type dialog after the learning session is over, or without the presence of the instructor to personally address such queries.
Conversely, another aspect of emulating a human-like dialog involves the use of oral feedback. In other words, many persons prefer to receive answers and information in audible form. While a form of this functionality is used by some websites to communicate information to visitors, it is not performed in a real-time, interactive question-answer dialog fashion so its effectiveness and usefulness is limited.
Yet another area that could benefit from speech-based interaction involves so-called xe2x80x9csearchxe2x80x9d engines used by INTERNET users to locate information of interest at web sites, such as the those available at YAHOO(copyright).com, METACRAWLER(copyright).com, EXCITE(copyright).com, etc. These tools permit the user to form a search query using either combinations of keywords or metacategories to search through a web page database containing text indices associated with one or more distinct web pages. After processing the user""s request, therefore, the search engine returns a number of hits which correspond, generally, to URL pointers and text excerpts from the web pages that represent the closest match made by such search engine for the particular user query based on the search processing logic used by search engine. The structure and operation of such prior art search engines, including the mechanism by which they build the web page database, and parse the search query, are well known in the art. To date, applicant is unaware of any such search engine that can easily and reliably search and retrieve information based on speech input from a user.
There are a number of reasons why the above environments (e-commerce, e-support, remote learning, INTERNET searching, etc.) do not utilize speech-based interfaces, despite the many benefits that would otherwise flow from such capability. First, there is obviously a requirement that the output of the speech recognizer be as accurate as possible. One of the more reliable approaches to speech recognition used at this time is based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM)xe2x80x94a model used to mathematically describe any time series. A conventional usage of this technique is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,587,670 incorporated by reference herein. Because speech is considered to have an underlying sequence of one or more symbols, the HMM models corresponding to each symbol are trained on vectors from the speech waveforms. The Hidden Markov Model is a finite set of states, each of which is associated with a (generally multi-dimensional) probability distribution. Transitions among the states are governed by a set of probabilities called transition probabilities. In a particular state an outcome or observation can be generated, according to the associated probability distribution. This finite state machine changes state once every time unit, and each time t such that a state j is entered, a spectral parameter vector Ot is generated with probability density Bj(Ot). It is only the outcome, not the state visible to an external observer and therefore states are xe2x80x9chiddenxe2x80x9d to the outside; hence the name Hidden Markov Model. The basic theory of HMMs was published in a series of classic papers by Baum and his colleagues in the late 1960""s and early 1970""s. HMMs were first used in speech applications by Baker at Carnegie Mellon, by Jelenik and colleagues at IBM in the late 1970""s and by Steve Young and colleagues at Cambridge University, UK in the 1990""s. Some typical papers and texts are as follows:
1. L. E. Baum, T. Petrie, xe2x80x9cStatistical inference for probabilistic functions for finite state Markov chainsxe2x80x9d, Ann. Math. Stat., 37: 1554-1563, 1966
2. L. E. Baum, xe2x80x9cAn inequality and associated maximation technique in statistical estimation for probabilistic functions of Markov processesxe2x80x9d, Inequalities 3: 1-8, 1972
3. J. H. Baker, xe2x80x9cThe dragon systemxe2x80x94An Overviewxe2x80x9d, IEEE Trans. on ASSP Proc., ASSP-23(1): 24-29, Feb. 1975
4. F. Jeninek et al, xe2x80x9cContinuous Speech Recognition: Statistical methodsxe2x80x9d in Handbook of Statistics, II, P. R. Kristnaiad, Ed. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, North-Holland, 1982
5. L. R. Bahl, F. Jeninek, R. L. Mercer, xe2x80x9cA maximum likelihood approach to continuous speech recognitionxe2x80x9d, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., PAMI-5: 179-190,1983
6. J. D. Ferguson, xe2x80x9cHidden Markov Analysis: An Introductionxe2x80x9d, in Hidden Markov Models for Speech, Institute of Defense Analyses, Princeton, N.J. 1980.
7. H. R. Rabiner and B. H. Juang, xe2x80x9cFundamentals of Speech Recognitionxe2x80x9d, Prentice Hall, 1993
8. H. R. Rabiner, xe2x80x9cDigital Processing of Speech Signalsxe2x80x9d, Prentice Hall, 1978
More recently research has progressed in extending HMM and combining HMMs with neural networks to speech recognition applications at various laboratories. The following is a representative paper:
9. Nelson Morgan, Hervxc3xa9 Bourlard, Steve Renals, Michael Cohen and Horacio Franco (1993), Hybrid Neural Network/Hidden Markov Model Systems for Continuous Speech Recognition. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Vol.7, No.4 pp. 899-916. Also in I. Guyon and P. Wang editors, Advances in Pattern Recognition Systems using Neural Networks, Vol. 7 of a Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence. World Scientific, Feb. 1994.
All of the above are hereby incorporated by reference. While the HMM-based speech recognition yields very good results, contemporary variations of this technique cannot guarantee a word accuracy requirement of 100% exactly and consistently, as will be required for WWW applications for all possible all user and environment conditions. Thus, although speech recognition technology has been available for several years, and has improved significantly, the technical requirements have placed severe restrictions on the specifications for the speech recognition accuracy that is required for an application that combines speech recognition and natural language processing to work satisfactorily.
In contrast to word recognition, Natural language processing (NLP) is concerned with the parsing, understanding and indexing of transcribed utterances and larger linguistic units. Because spontaneous speech contains many surface phenomena such as disfluencies,xe2x80x94hesitations, repairs and restarts, discourse markers such as xe2x80x98wellxe2x80x99 and other elements which cannot be handled by the typical speech recognizer, it is the problem and the source of the large gap that separates speech recognition and natural language processing technologies. Except for silence between utterances, another problem is the absence of any marked punctuation available for segmenting the speech input into meaningful units such as utterances. For optimal NLP performance, these types of phenomena should be annotated at its input. However, most continuous speech recognition systems produce only a raw sequence of words. Examples of conventional systems using NLP are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,991,094, 5,068,789, 5,146,405 and 5,680,628, all of which are incorporated by reference herein.
Second, most of the very reliable voice recognition systems are speaker-dependent, requiring that the interface be xe2x80x9ctrainedxe2x80x9d with the user""s voice, which takes a lot of time, and is thus very undesirable from the perspective of a WWW environment, where a user may interact only a few times with a particular website. Furthermore, speaker-dependent systems usually require a large user dictionary (one for each unique user) which reduces the speed of recognition. This makes it much harder to implement a real-time dialog interface with satisfactory response capability (i.e., something that mirrors normal conversationxe2x80x94on the order of 3-5 seconds is probably ideal). At present, the typical shrink-wrapped speech recognition application software include offerings from IBM (VIAVOICE(trademark)) and Dragon Systems (DRAGON(trademark)). While most of these applications are adequate for dictation and other transcribing applications, they are woefully inadequate for applications such as NLQS where the word error rate must be close to 0%. In addition these offerings require long training times and are typically are non client-server configurations. Other types of trained systems are discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,231,670 assigned to Kurzweil, and which is also incorporated by reference herein.
Another significant problem faced in a distributed voice-based system is a lack of uniformity/control in the speech recognition process. In a typical stand-alone implementation of a speech recognition system, the entire SR engine runs on a single client. A well-known system of this type is depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 4,991,217 incorporated by reference herein. These clients can take numerous forms (desktop PC, laptop PC, PDA, etc.) having varying speech signal processing and communications capability. Thus, from the server side perspective, it is not easy to assure uniform treatment of all users accessing a voice-enabled web page, since such users may have significantly disparate word recognition and error rate performances. While a prior art reference to Gould et al.xe2x80x94U.S. Pat. No. 5,915,236xe2x80x94discusses generally the notion of tailoring a recognition process to a set of available computational resources, it does not address or attempt to solve the issue of how to optimize resources in a distributed environment such as a client-server model. Again, to enable such voice-based technologies on a wide-spread scale it is far more preferable to have a system that harmonizes and accounts for discrepancies in individual systems so that even the thinnest client is supportable, and so that all users are able to interact in a satisfactory manner with the remote server running the e-commerce, e-support and/or remote learning application.
Two references that refer to a distributed approach for speech recognition include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,956,683 and 5,960,399 incorporated by reference herein. In the first of these, U.S. Pat. No. 5,956,683xe2x80x94Distributed Voice Recognition System (assigned to Qualcomm) an implementation of a distributed voice recognition system between a telephony-based handset and a remote station is described. In this implementation, all of the word recognition operations seem to take place at the handset. This is done since the patent describes the benefits that result from locating of the system for acoustic feature extraction at the portable or cellular phone in order to limit degradation of the acoustic features due to quantization distortion resulting from the narrow bandwidth telephony channel. This reference therefore does not address the issue of how to ensure adequate performance for a very thin client platform. Moreover, it is difficult to determine, how, if at all, the system can perform real-time word recognition, and there is no meaningful description of how to integrate the system with a natural language processor.
The second of these referencesxe2x80x94U.S. Pat. No. 5,960,399xe2x80x94Client/Server Speech Processor/Recognizer (assigned to GTE) describes the implementation of a HMM-based distributed speech recognition system. This reference is not instructive in many respects, however, including how to optimize acoustic feature extraction for a variety of client platforms, such as by performing a partial word recognition process where appropriate. Most importantly, there is only a description of a primitive server-based recognizer that only recognizes the user""s speech and simply returns certain keywords such as the user""s name and travel destination to fill out a dedicated form on the user""s machine. Also, the streaming of the acoustic parameters does not appear to be implemented in real-time as it can only take place after silence is detected. Finally, while the reference mentions the possible use of natural language processing (column 9) there is no explanation of how such function might be implemented in a real-time fashion to provide an interactive feel for the user.
An object of the present invention, therefore, is to provide an improved system and method for overcoming the limitations of the prior art noted above;
A primary object of the present invention is to provide a word and phrase recognition system that is flexibly and optimally distributed across a client/platform computing architecture, so that improved accuracy, speed and uniformity can be achieved for a wide group of users;
A further object of the present invention is to provide a speech recognition system that efficiently integrates a distributed word recognition system with a natural language processing system, so that both individual words and entire speech utterances can be quickly and accurately recognized in any number of possible languages;
A related object of the present invention is to provide an efficient query response system so that an extremely accurate, real-time set of appropriate answers can be given in response to speech-based queries;
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide an interactive, real-time instructional/learning system that is distributed across a client/server architecture, and permits a real-time question/answer session with an interactive character;
A related object of the present invention is to implement such interactive character with an articulated response capability so that the user experiences a human-like interaction;
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide an INTERNET website with speech processing capability so that voice based data and commands can be used to interact with such site, thus enabling voice-based e-commerce and e-support services to be easily scaleable;
Another object is to implement a distributed speech recognition system that utilizes environmental variables as part of the recognition process to improve accuracy and speed;
A further object is to provide a scaleable query/response database system, to support any number of query topics and users as needed for a particular application and instantaneous demand;
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a query recognition system that employs a two-step approach, including a relatively rapid first step to narrow down the list of potential responses to a smaller candidate set, and a second more computationally intensive second step to identify the best choice to be returned in response to the query from the candidate set;
A further object of the present invention is to provide a natural language processing system that facilitates query recognition by extracting lexical components of speech utterances, which components can be used for rapidly identifying a candidate set of potential responses appropriate for such speech utterances;
Another related object of the present invention is to provide a natural language processing system that facilitates query recognition by comparing lexical components of speech utterances with a candidate set of potential response to provide an extremely accurate best response to such query.
One general aspect of the present invention, therefore, relates to a natural language query system (NLQS) that offers a fully interactive method for answering user""s questions over a distributed network such as the INTERNET or a local intranet. This interactive system when implemented over the worldwide web (WWW) services of the INTERNET functions so that a client or user can ask a question in a natural language such as English, French, German or Spanish and receive the appropriate answer at his or her personal computer also in his or her native natural language.
The system is distributed and consists of a set of integrated software modules at the client""s machine and another set of integrated software programs resident on a server or set of servers. The client-side software program is comprised of a speech recognition program, an agent and its control program, and a communication program. The server-side program is comprised of a communication program, a natural language engine (NLE), a database processor (DBProcess), an interface program for interfacing the DBProcess with the NLE, and a SQL database. In addition, the client""s machine is equipped with a microphone and a speaker. Processing of the speech utterance is divided between the client and server side so as to optimize processing and transmission latencies, and so as to provide support for even very thin client platforms.
In the context of an interactive learning application, the system is specifically used to provide a single-best answer to a user""s question. The question that is asked at the client""s machine is articulated by the speaker and captured by a microphone that is built in as in the case of a notebook computer or is supplied as a standard peripheral attachment. Once the question is captured, the question is processed partially by NLQS client-side software resident in the client""s machine. The output of this partial processing is a set of speech vectors that are transported to the server via the INTERNET to complete the recognition of the user""s questions. This recognized speech is then converted to text at the server.
After the user""s question is decoded by the speech recognition engine (SRE) located at the server, the question is converted to a structured query language (SQL) query. This query is then simultaneously presented to a software process within the server called DBProcess for preliminary processing and to a Natural Language Engine (NLE) module for extracting the noun phrases (NP) of the user""s question. During the process of extracting the noun phrase within the NLE, the tokens of the users"" question are tagged. The tagged tokens are then grouped so that the NP list can be determined. This information is stored and sent to the DBProcess process.
In the DBProcess, the SQL query is fully customized using the NP extracted from the user""s question and other environment variables that are relevant to the application. For example, in a training application, the user""s selection of course, chapter and or section would constitute the environment variables. The SQL query is constructed using the extended SQL Full-Text predicatesxe2x80x94CONTAINS, FREETEXT, NEAR, AND. The SQL query is next sent to the Full-Text search engine within the SQL database, where a Full-Text search procedure is initiated. The result of this search procedure is recordset of answers. This recordset contains stored questions that are similar linguistically to the user""s question. Each of these stored questions has a paired answer stored in a separate text file, whose path is stored in a table of the database.
The entire recordset of returned stored answers is then returned to the NLE engine in the form of an array. Each stored question of the array is then linguistically processed sequentially one by one. This linguistic processing constitutes the second step of a 2-step algorithm to determine the single best answer to the user""s question. This second step proceeds as follows: for each stored question that is returned in the recordset, a NP of the stored question is compared with the NP of the user""s question. After all stored questions of the array are compared with the user""s question, the stored question that yields the maximum match with the user""s question is selected as the best possible stored question that matches the user""s question. The metric that is used to determine the best possible stored question is the number of noun phrases.
The stored answer that is paired to the best-stored question is selected as the one that answers the user""s question. The ID tag of the question is then passed to the DBProcess. This DBProcess returns the answer which is stored in a file.
A communication link is again established to send the answer back to the client in compressed form. The answer once received by the client is decompressed and articulated to the user by the text-to-speech engine. Thus, the invention can be used in any number of different applications involving interactive learning systems, INTERNET related commerce sites, INTERNET search engines, etc.
Computer-assisted instruction environments often require the assistance of mentors or live teachers to answer questions from students. This assistance often takes the form of organizing a separate pre-arranged forum or meeting time that is set aside for chat sessions or live call-in sessions so that at a scheduled time answers to questions may be provided. Because of the time immediacy and the on-demand or asynchronous nature of on-line training where a student may log on and take instruction at any time and at any location, it is important that answers to questions be provided in a timely and cost-effective manner so that the user or student can derive the maximum benefit from the material presented.
This invention addresses the above issues. It provides the user or student with answers to questions that are normally channeled to a live teacher or mentor. This invention provides a single-best answer to questions asked by the student. The student asks the question in his or her own voice in the language of choice. The speech is recognized and the answer to the question is found using a number of technologies including distributed speech recognition, full-text search database processing, natural language processing and text-to-speech technologies. The answer is presented to the user, as in the case of a live teacher, in an articulated manner by an agent that mimics the mentor or teacher, and in the language of choicexe2x80x94English, French, German, Japanese or other natural spoken language. The user can choose the agent""s gender as well as several speech parameters such as pitch, volume and speed of the character""s voice.
Other applications that benefit from NLQS are e-commerce applications. In this application, the user""s query for a price of a book, compact disk or for the availability of any item that is to be purchased can be retrieved without the need to pick through various lists on successive web pages. Instead, the answer is provided directly to the user without any additional user input.
Similarly, it is envisioned that this system can be used to provide answers to frequently-asked questions (FAQs), and as a diagnostic service tool for e-support. These questions are typical of a give web site and are provided to help the user find information related to a payment procedure or the specifications of, or problems experienced with a product/service. In all of these applications, the NLQS architecture can be applied.
A number of inventive methods associated with these architectures are also beneficially used in a variety of INTERNET related applications.
Although the inventions are described below in a set of preferred embodiments, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art the present inventions could be beneficially used in many environments where it is necessary to implement fast, accurate speech recognition, and/or to provide a human-like dialog capability to an intelligent system.